National Topics

Youthful optimism can be hard to find in Japan, where millennials rank as the gloomiest of those in the world’s biggest economies. While a majority of young adults in its trading partners see bright futures and successful careers ahead, fewer than 40 percent of Japanese do, making them the most ...

What does it feel like to forget where you are and why you’re at a place — in other words, what is it like to experience the symptoms of dementia? Silver Wood Corp., operator of a housing complex for elderly people, has developed a ...

Nagisa Hirai was an active child who loved playing soccer with the boys. But that early happiness dissipated on her first day at elementary school when she became frightened after being unable to find her classroom. Over time, she became a hikikomori, a Japanese ...

A 13-year-old boy in Yokohama who was bullied by classmates after evacuating from nuclear crisis-hit Fukushima has made public plea urging young people suffering a similar ordeal not to consider death as the answer to their problems. “There are adults who will definitely be ...

On a morning in mid-September, Utinan Won hugged his mother and then watched as she passed through departures at Tokyo’s Narita airport on her way to Bangkok. Two and a half months earlier, judges in a Tokyo court upheld deportation orders against 16-year-old Utinan ...

A nonprofit organization in Osaka recently launched what it touts as an easy-matching adoption website, triggering criticism from experts that adoptions should be made more carefully. The group posts the age, job, place of domicile, annual income and assets of prospective parents on the ...

Dogs are a man’s best friend, and for many, cats are, too. But the harsh reality is that in 2015, 82,902 dogs and cats were put to sleep nationwide, with cats making up 67,091, or roughly 80 percent, of the total due to their ...

Two prominent lawyers, one for the death penalty and the other against it, held a heated debate last Thursday at a symposium in Tokyo that sought to deepen discussion on Japan’s capital punishment system. Yuji Ogawara, a Tokyo-based lawyer, contended that the death penalty ...

An elementary school in Yokohama ignored a police report that a transfer student from disaster-hit Fukushima Prefecture was possibly being bullied and extorted by classmates, sources said Thursday. The local police notified the school in November 2014 that other students were demanding money from ...

Japan’s bar association is urging a Malaysian low-cost carrier to apologize to a Japanese man with disabilities after it refused to check-in his electric wheelchair, eventually causing him to miss his flight at Kansai airport. The Japan Federation of Bar Associations said on Wednesday ...